Category: computer geek stuff

I just beat myself in the head for a better part of a day on this… I was using the predefined application template for sharepoint 2013 (which is only available in ASA 9.5 or above.) and getting nowhere. The bookmark would start to open sharepoint then pause. In the end, this command fixed it.

auto-signon allow ip 172.18.6.0 255.255.255.0 auth-type ntlm

Once I did that I went with the default Sharepoint 2013 configuration and everything worked like a champ. Go figure.

I was trying to automate an scp file copy for work and having a hell of a time with the host key. Even though I was logged in as the same user that the script is running, when it’s run non interactive, for some reason it cannot find the host key in the registry, and fails. Some info.

putty and pscp.exe keep their host keys in – [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareSimonTathamPuTTYSshHostKeys]

if you run your pscp.exe with the –batch command, you cannot input any console input

in order to get this to work, I had to echo a “Y” to it like this – echo y | C:_scriptspscp -sftp –v -etc. etc

Basically, If you try to echo the Y with the –batch option, then you can’t because the –batch option makes it ignore any input. In order to make this secure, I ran it once the way I have listed above, and once the host key was stored in the right place, I removed the echo and added the batch again.

.net health monitoring would log an app pool start but not log an app pool stop or shutdown

I had the suspicion that this was related to random app pool restarts during the day on one of our webservices

other debuggers would not attach to an app pool and work (like avicode that comes with SCOM)

I looked for how to fix this since March, of course I was too stubborn to call Quest, so that’s my fault. Much googling didn’t resolve much so when I finally did figure this out, I wanted to post what I found. It turns out that debugging is set in an environment variable. Seems like it’s a session variable because it’s set in the parameters of a service, so that way it runs with the service in the user context of the service. This is something I had never run across before so it seemed kinda odd.

In the end we had to remove the reg key “Environment” (and the contents of the key) from the two locations. This key is what sets the debugger to enabled and tells it which debugger to use.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesW3SVC]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesIISADMIN]

Once these have been deleted, all you have to do is IISRESET the server and the error is gone and random app pool restarts have ceased. As of this writing I have not tried to reinstall the SCOM AVIcode to the webservice, but I’m certain that it will work now.

Recently (about 5 minutes ago) I did an upgrade in production of our Team Foundation 2008 server to Team Foundation 2010. I had a dry run that worked well but of course on the real thing I had a couple of issues. Here are some notes.

TFS requires sysadmin on the new SQL server, it wants to create/drop databases like crazy

TFS previous to 2010 required sharepoint to be installed, with 2010 it’s just an option, you can add it later.

To clean up from an earlier install (failed, test run, etc.) you can run this command (see the gotcha at the end!)

We had an error when trying to install on production because it kept finding information from the previous one. Apparently the tsconfig /setup uninstall:all doesn’t really uninstall all! There were extended database properties left over that we had to delete manually. Until we did this, we received this error:

TF30046: The instance information does not match.

There are very useful logfiles located in:

C:ProgramDataMicrosoftTeam FoundationServer ConfigurationLogs

In order to get visual studio 2005 to connect to TFS 2010, you have to install in this order:

I recently had to make some changes to my scom test environment server. It’s a single virtual machine with scom, sql, ssrs, the works on it. Despite what one would think, it has performed well with about 30 agents. Recently I added about that many more and it pushed up the ram to the 4gb max that I had given it. When I added more I realized I had used 2008 x32 for the OS (oops) and was not able to see the extra ram. After some research I found that I could do an upgrade from 2008 standard to enterprise, which is what I did. Afterwards, scom wouldn’t run because the SDK service would not start. This is the event log message.

I will turn this into a more useful blog post when I have a few minutes but for now it is just a collection of links about dashboarding using the System Center Configuration Manager Solution Accelerator. The short story is that this runs on top of Sharepoint 3.0, which is free, meaning you can run this for free. It’s not specific to SCCM so you can dashboard any sql data you want! Cool!